The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo has announced the line-up for the 21st edition of its MOT Annual series. "Through the Body" will run from 20 February to 30 May 2027 and brings together four artists — Yuki Kobayashi, Saori Hara, Mayuko Inui and tsu-tsu — who use martial arts, choreography, song and acting to revisit the past and other people's experiences, searching for forms of expression that emerge from the body itself.

The exhibition starts from the idea that knowledge built up through the body contains sensations that language and documentation alone cannot capture. Rather than fixed techniques, the artists treat movement and repeated action as something that changes and renews itself over time. Their starting points range from traditional martial-arts lineages and family histories to folk tales and the lives of strangers, pursued through interviews, fieldwork and archival research before taking shape as video, installation, photography and drawing.

Kobayashi presents new video and installation work growing out of his Wing Chun project, practising the southern Chinese martial art with his own body to trace how inherited forms shift across regions and generations. Hara shows a video installation developed from "Da Dad Dada", rooted in the memory of her father, who danced in musicals in Japan and the United States in the 1960s. Inui works from the legends of the sea goddess Toyotama-hime and the immortal nun Yao Bikuni, using song and storytelling to examine gender, the body, time and place. Tsu-tsu, who calls his method documentary acting, follows the roughly 350,000 people born on the same day as him, with a new installation drawn from a 2026 journey across the United States.

The architecture collective Garage, formed by Shun Odagiri, Kenji Seo and Mizuho Watanabe, designs the galleries so that the works and the space respond to visitors' movement and the passing of time. Each of the four artists will perform during the run, alongside a jointly made performance, while the filmmaker Shun Ikezoe records the dialogue and rehearsals behind it as a video work in the show.